I. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the graphical portrayal of the last remaining minute before each hour in certain types of digital time displays.
II. Description of the Prior Art
The prior art includes balanced, quadribalanced and enhanced quadribalanced digital time displays, as described, for example, in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,264,966; 4,483,628; 4,627,737; 4,271,497 and 6,215,736 B1, the disclosures of which are incorporated herein by reference. These displays have the common characteristic that upon reaching the last remaining minute before the commencement of the next hour, depicted by a minute digit 1 on the left side and a zero seconds digit below the next hour digit, there are no additional minutes to be displayed. Only the last 59 seconds remain to be counted down.
III. Recognition of Problems in the Prior Art
U.S. Pat. No. 5,757,730 describes a system of graphically portraying the countdown of the last 59 seconds of a balanced digital time display in the space previously occupied by remaining minutes to the next hour. This system consists of activating six horizontal display elements of a pair of seven-segmented display elements, and then sequentially flashing each element in ten second increments down from the top to the bottom of initially the outboard segments during the initial thirty seconds, and thereafter the inboard segments during the last thirty seconds before the next hour.
A deficiency of the aforesaid system has become evident, in that while only one of the six horizontal elements is flashing during any of the six incremental ten second periods, the configuration of the flashing element is not visually different from that of the other elements which remain steady on as each of the previous flashing periods occurs. Consequently, there is not a visually different, immediately recognizable distinction between the flashing element and the steady on elements. Such a distinction is needed both to uniquely identify the flashing element and also distinguish its position relative to the others during the countdown of the last 59 seconds before the next hour, thus enhancing an analog representation of where the countdown is situated at any given time.
The present invention provides a simple and effective remedy to the above-described problem, based upon incorporating a small flashing zero as an immediately recognizable analog of the current ten second period being counted down and thus distinguished from the remaining ten second periods not yet reached during the entire 59 second interval before the next hour. Such a flashing zero could be, for example, the six one-third-sized zeros of two ten-segmented laddered arrays of display elements, which are the subject of a previous application Ser. No. 09/901,420 filed by the present inventor.
Further details of the present invention will be readily understood by reference to a specific embodiment thereof, as illustrated in the drawings and described below.